José Gregorio Toledo

JOSÉ GREGORIO TOLEDO PÉREZ (Villa de Mazo, La Palma, 1906 - Madrid, 1980).
"Still life with vase", 1957.
Oil on canvas.
It presents splashes.
Measurements: 73 x 92 cm; 90 x 110 cm (frame).
Gregorio Toledo was born in the town of Villa de Mazo, on the island of La Palma, in the bosom of a family dedicated to agriculture and small commerce. After completing his primary and secondary education at the Instituto de Enseñanza Media and the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Santa Cruz de La Palma, he moved to Madrid in 1924, when he was only eighteen years old, to enter the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Thanks to a scholarship granted by the Cabildo Insular de La Palma in 1927, he was able to continue his education in the capital, where he would establish his definitive residence, with some brief stays in Barcelona and Toledo. His youth was marked by the influence of the so-called New Objectivity, a trend that in Spain took the form of a serene realism, influenced by the postulates of the German critic Franz Roh and disseminated by José Ortega y Gasset through the Revista de Occidente. From the forties onwards, however, his painting began to move away from the avant-garde and from any imposed academic norm, orienting itself towards a search for formal purification anchored in tradition, with a restrained lyricism and a palette of great chromatic richness. His work can be organized, as Enrique Lafuente Ferrari pointed out, around three major genres: portraiture, still life and free compositions of tenuous but very personal subject matter.
During the years of study and first contacts with the cultural environment of Madrid, between 1924 and 1937, Toledo maintained close relationships with important figures of thought and literature. He painted portraits of the jurist Luis Jiménez de Asúa, the philologist Joaquín de Entrambasaguas and the Arabist Jaime Oliver Asín, as well as the poet Federico García Lorca, whom he represented in 1931 in a famous painting that shows him dressed in a yellow kimono in front of a symbolic map of the Atlantic. He also portrayed the philosopher María Zambrano, whose friendship was significant at this stage, although her portraits are known today only through photographs. After completing his scholarship, he joined the prestigious Casa Maumejean stained glass workshop as a painter of figures on glass, collaborating in 1929 in the restoration of the stained glass windows of the cathedral of Seville under the direction of Francisco Murillo Herrera. In 1932 he left that job to focus entirely on painting, moving to Barcelona for a brief period, where the possibility of working for a Belgian dealer arose.
The economic crisis that intensified in Spain in 1933 led him to take the competitive examinations for professorships in drawing, winning a place at the Ausiàs March Institute in Barcelona. In this context he was surprised by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, when he had already been selected to participate in both the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1937 he married Helia Escuder Alarcón, a former classmate from the School of Fine Arts, and was mobilized by the Army of the Republic, where he served until the end of the conflict in a technical brigade. Only two works remain from that period: a portrait of his son, born in December of that year, and another of the painter Pedro Bueno.
At the end of the war, Toledo returned with his family to Madrid, where, thanks to the mediation of Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, he was introduced to the Marquis of Lozoya, director general of Fine Arts. The latter entrusted him with the restoration of the stained glass windows of the cathedral of Toledo, damaged during the siege of the Alcazar, although the project was never completed due to the material limitations of the post-war period. Despite the difficulties, in 1942 he managed to resume his artistic career by obtaining the Conde de Cartagena scholarship from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, along with a diploma of honor at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and first prize at the Salón de Otoño in Madrid.
The recognition continued in the following years: in 1943 he received the second medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and participated in an important exhibition of self-portraits organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. In 1945 he held his first solo exhibition at the Macarrón Gallery in Madrid and won the first medal at the National Exhibition with his work La visita (The Visit), noted for its compositional balance and refined use of color. In addition to his pictorial work, Gregorio Toledo was a skilled performer of classical guitar, a discipline that he cultivated in parallel to his artistic dedication and that formed an integral part of his creative universe throughout his life.